Zaha Hadid Architects and Epic Games have collaborated on an in-game experience for the popular Fortnite video game. Titled ‘Re:Imagine London’, the experience sees an island created within Fortnite that players can use to explore and interact with London’s built environment.

Using Epic Games’ Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), Re:Imagine London seeks to explore the use of the UEFN for practical applications in architecture and “pool creator talent across industries including architecture, landscape, and interiors.” To build the experience, the team used content provided by Zaha Hadid Architects, AccuCities, and Beyond Creative.

“Situated around London’s waterfronts, the project investigates urban intensification and community participation in the creation of walkable, mixed-use, sustainable development, the team says. “The experience facilitates rapid optioneering through an engaging and exploratory approach to negotiating the complexities of the urban condition to build collaboratively in a contemporary context.”

As with Fortnite’s wider feature of cooperative multiplayer building of temporary structures, the Re:Imagine London experience includes usable building components crafted in various scales, expressing architectural, geometric, and spatial features consistent with ZHA’s built works. The elements also incorporate recent advances in construction technology while embodying a parametric approach through typological variation, gradated and volumetric lighting, and material effects.

News of the experience comes months after Zaha Hadid Architects were among the partners behind the launch of a digital spatial asset platform Treasury. Back in 2022, the firm announced it was planning a metaverse city for Liberland while in 2021 the firm led an NFT exhibition at Art Basel Miami.

Epic Games, meanwhile, recently collaborated with Safdie Architects and creative agency Neoscape on the recreation of the original vision for Habitat67 in virtual reality.

Check out the gallery below for behind-the-scenes process images behind the creation of Re:Imagine London.